In the media

Selected public comment by Professor David Price

“We submit, we submit!” With this teasingly
ambiguous Tweet, the UCL Research Excellence Framework (REF) Team reported to
the world the culmination of an endeavour that has detained more brilliant
minds, for more time, than any of us would like to think.

This parting Tweet captures the unavoidable duality
to our thinking about REF – it is both something we suffer, and something we
promote.

Nobody actually does research for the pleasure of
submitting it to a vast government bureaucratic assessment exercise. REF takes
a relatively simple practical question – how should one element of government
research funding be distributed? – and complicates it to an extraordinary
degree. …

UCL won £31 million more research funding than
any other institution in the past financial year, figures indicate.

According to Times Higher Education’s
annual analysis of research council grant data, UCL won grants worth
£135 million in 2012-13 at a success rate of 33 per cent by the number
of applications. …

UCL’s
total represents a 90 per cent rise on the previous year’s figures at a
time when the total value of research council grant allocations
increased by about 50 per cent.David Price, vice-provost for
research at UCL, said his institution had received a “tremendous boost”
from its emphasis on building cross-disciplinary consortia around global
challenges such as infectious diseases, energy demand and dementia.“Those
are areas in which we’ve put a lot of emphasis within our research
strategy for many years, and people have been working long-term to build
partnerships and exciting research programmes. This definitely isn’t an
overnight success,” he said.

A proposal by the Natural Environment Research Council
to find new owners for four of its research centres has raised concerns
that the organisations could be fully or partly privatised. …

However, others see the
proposal as an opportunity. David Price, vice-provost for research at UCL, says he would like to see a greater
commercial role for centres. “Geological surveying could certainly be
market-driven,” he says, adding that the BGS could potentially be run as
a consultancy.

Prof David Price discusses how the UCL
participated as a case study in the latest Ithaka S+R/ SCA report:
'Sustaining our Digital Future: Institutional strategies for Digital
Content'. David considers how UCL has continued to develop its
digital content and services, even at a time of fiscal constraint and
outlines the tactics and techniques that have been employed to foster
innovative collaboration within UCL.

The
Science and Engineering South Consortium, unveiled on 9 May, contains
the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Southampton, Imperial College
London and UCL. …According to
David Price, vice-provost for research at UCL,
this “total dominance” in engineering and physical sciences made the
alliance a “no-brainer” and he hoped it would permit successful bids for
funds that its members would not be able to win individually. …

Professor Price
agreed that there were “other institutions in the region and elsewhere
that might benefit from being more closely associated” and emphasised
SES-5 was “not closed”. But no “formal requests for discussion” had been
received and, in his view, it made sense first for the large founder
members to formulate the consortium’s strategy. …

Professor Price said the historical rivalries within SES-5 would not
inhibit its growth, noting that UCL academics had more partnerships with
colleagues from Imperial than from any other institution. He said SES-5
was part of a new “zeitgeist of collaboration”.

Ministers last week pledged an additional £10 million after vocal disquiet
from some Russell Group institutions about the potential cost to them of
author-pays open-access publishing. … David
Price, vice-provost for research at UCL, said that researchers should not be “deluded" into thinking that £10 million would resolve the “systemic weaknesses" in the original case made by the Finch report. “University
research budgets will have to fill the funding gap - meaning less
research," he said.

Why is it so important to have a broad portfolio and what
other particular areas do you want to grow?

"I
think a multi-faculty comprehensive university is a place where you can
actually find solutions to the world’s problems, which would require you to
tension technology development with social sciences. Our entire research
strategy is based on the importance of how you impact the research being done;
it can only be done through really social science and humanities filters. I
think there’s scope to grow humanities and social sciences because we’ve got
excellent people but the numbers there aren’t quite as large as they might be.
Also, engineering is growing very strongly and there’s strong development in
biomedical engineering and high-performance computing. So those are all areas
in which the institution is strategically putting efforts."

It
is a central irony of the Finch report that in seeking to maximise the
accessibility of scholarly knowledge and evidence - and thereby
encourage openness and transparency - its authors have failed either to
consider fully the facts before them or to substantiate some of their
assertions. …

I think that the more preferable approach is to
move to green open access, coupled with a national licensing
arrangement. This would achieve the objectives set out in the Finch
report of opening up access to the research literature while minimising
the costs and associated risks. …My suggested next step in the
development of open access is, therefore, to see green open access fully
implemented in the UK. The Finch report has missed a trick by failing
to model green versus gold. Extensive economic modelling in a
forthcoming Jisc-funded report by the Open Access Implementation Group
shows that green is the cheapest option for universities. The study will
also show that the best way to move from a subscription model to open
access is via green, not gold. Green open access is also the route
propounded by the European Union in its current funding programmes as a
standard route for open-access publication.At UCL, we have seen first-hand the value of green open access (our
institutional repository, UCL Discovery, is the largest in the UK). With
as yet only a small fraction of our output available, we are still
recording more than 500,000 downloads a year, and the figure is growing.

The
Finch report is right to conclude that the UK has an opportunity to
demonstrate global leadership in the dissemination of research and in
championing a knowledge-led economy. But it has surveyed the open-access
landscape incompletely. Gold is not the answer: it is a so-called cure
that is likely to be worse than the disease.

Implementation of the Finch Report on Open Access would "cripple university systems
with extra expense. … National licences are the preferred way forward in
the immediate future for many Russell Group Universities. They exist in other
European countries. For an agreed amount, publishers allow access to their
content by all sectors in society. UCL sees this as a transition step to full
Open Access. Initial discussions suggest that the cost of national licensing
would be cheaper than the Gold OA Finch is recommending."

[Professor Price said] there was a danger that in times of scarcity, distinct
research councils would concentrate their funding on "what they perceive
to be their core business", leaving less for the "key areas" at the
boundaries.

Another key concept in the research strategy is "leadership", which Professor Price distinguished from excellence on
the grounds that it was active rather than passive. As well as being eminent researchers, their
leadership obligations would also require senior UCL academics to "be
putting back into their discipline by doing professional service, and into the
institution by managing and developing strategic areas in their own departments
and leading career development of younger colleagues.

In
a letter to Vince Cable, business secretary, UCL vice-provosts David Price and
Stephen Caddick propose that less money should be disbursed as competitive
grants and contracts for which universities are required to bid. Instead,
they say, more research should be funded by block grants – stable funds that
are awarded annually and without conditions on the basis of a five-yearly
assessment of each university’s research output. The two professors call for an
end to the “treadmill so that leading researchers spend less time writing grant
applications ... and more time undertaking research”.

We at UCL have adopted what we call the
"Wisdom Agenda". This involves drawing on the breadth of our
collective expertise: bringing a
range of discipline-specific data, perspectives and methodologies to bear on
complex problems.
Exploiting our differences adds value to our insights; our collective
expertise can exceed the
sum of its parts. We define
the outcomes of this work as "impact", one word among a host of
terms that universities must
reclaim.

We need universities that are world-leading in research. It is these leading universities that underpin the UK's ability to continue to punch above its weight in a global research landscape, and to both compete and collaborate with global peers, as well as delivering considerable economic and social benefit to the UK.

Pursuing more collaboration between institutions, and in particular
between research-intensive ‘hubs’ and smaller ‘islands of excellence’ in other institutions, would mean that researchers from the
‘islands’ could work with larger research groups and access a high-quality research environment. Such collaboration would
allow funds to be invested in concentrations of excellence whilst making the most of all of the UK’s research talent and
ensuring that new and emerging areas of research can be supported.

One of the benefits of having a minister for
universities and science – and of having the same department responsible
for both higher education and research funding – should be that a
coherent strategy can be developed for the funding of the higher
education sector. …The abiding principle should be to fund
excellence. This is broadly agreed and has driven UK research funding
policy for decades. We argue that two further maxims should guide
policy:

• Fund research that is internationally competitive in
institutions that are able to compete and leverage their UK funding by
collaborating on the global stage

• Recognise the unique
importance of research-intensive multi-faculty universities. They can
stimulate the cross-disciplinary working that enables the dynamism of
the research base as well as the capacity to tackle systemically complex
global problems by applying knowledge and insights achieved from
working across different disciplines.